Sir Dave Brailsford may find his team has a bigger budget than ever before with Ineos’ backing.
Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters

With one bound, Sir Dave Brailsford is free. Confirmation that the team he has built over the last 10 years would continue has come early, as the petrochemical firm Ineos confirmed it will be Team Sky’s replacement name sponsor from early May. In December Brailsford seemed set for the biggest challenge of his 30 years in cycling: finding a new backer prepared to announce sponsorship in good time, and willing to finance the team to the level that had delivered six Tour de France wins with three different riders in seven attempts.

Getting this done early was critical to avoid pressure coming to bear on Sky’s marquee riders as their agents got the jitters. The level of finance mattered as well, because it was hard to imagine the attraction for Brailsford in putting a team on the road that would function at a lower level than Sky.

Team Sky to be renamed Team Ineos as takeover confirmed

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As for a corporate backer being willing or able to find the £35m or so per annum that Brailsford would need for several years, the background was not good amid Brexit uncertainty and a looming GMC tribunal over the team’s former doctor Richard Freeman’s alleged acquisition of the banned drug testosterone. Plus, the money would have to be committed far more rapidly than most companies would manage.

The answer was to look outside the corporate sponsorship environment, which explains initial rumours around a Colombian state oil company.

While Ineos might seem conventional in what it does – petrochemicals – critically its chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, is also 60% main shareholder. Team Sky’s budget will be small change in relation to Ineos’s multibillion turnover, and Ratcliffe’s personal fortune: in a company of this kind, a decision could be made as rapidly as was needed.

The news will be greeted with mixed emotions within cycling’s professional teams, who have found Team Sky an immovable object that has sat firmly between all of them – apart from Vincenzo Nibali in 2014 – and the sport’s ultimate prize, the Tour de France. In 2010, Team Sky were viewed with envy and disdain on their launch; since 2012 the disdain has been replaced by grudging admiration, for doing what other teams aspire to do, but better.

Team Sky’s have been dominant in recent editions of the Tour de France. Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

The envy remains, hinged on their outsize budget, which has distorted the way the sport functions. Team Sky’s cash reserves enable them to buy up potential rivals to riders such as of Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas – Mikel Landa of Spain a couple of years ago being the best example – diluting the opposition and meaning they can field super-strength teams in the Tour, powerful enough to snuff out most challenges. That is set to continue, in fact it is likely that the budget may increase further.

The positive side for cycling is that it retains its biggest – in strictly Tour de France terms – and most successful team, and with it some 80 jobs. Had Team Sky ceased to exist at the end of the season, that might have inspired some schadenfreude, and made Tours de France potentially more interesting in the next couple of years, but the sudden loss of their millions would have been disruptive. It would also have thrown into question the value of multiple victories in the sport’s showpiece. The argument would have run: if six Tours could not land a major player, what could?

Whether a mutation into Team Ineos will make Brailsford’s squad any less divisive remains to be seen. The chances are it won’t. Ineos is an easy company to dislike, given its activities are at the core of climate change, and it is committed to fracking in the UK; with exquisite irony, the new sponsor will be officially launched at May’s Tour de Yorkshire, where fracking is high on the agenda.

However, in a sport that happily takes money from Middle East governments, and where one of France’s leading teams is about to take on the mantle of the oil giant Total, the moral compass is fuzzy at best.

That brings us to Brailsford’s final challenge; the GMC tribunal that will – may? – eventually rule on the Freeman case, and could also shed some light on disputed claims that Team Sky used triamcinolone and tramadol, the former banned except with medical clearance, the latter now on a close watch list. Both the doctor and Team Sky deny any wrongdoing.

The charges levelled at Freeman are severe, but their potential ramifications for Brailsford under his new backer remain to be seen.

Team Sky was famous for a “zero tolerance” policy but it remains to be seen where Ineos, as the team’s new owner, might position themselves over whatever may emerge from a future hearing.

Finding a new sponsor may leave Brailsford in a safer position if the tribunal were eventually to find against Freeman, simply because a name and ownership change locates whatever the doctor may or may not have done in a past that is more easily dismissed. In that context, the upcoming rapid transition from Team Sky to Team Ineos could be useful in more ways than one.